if nobody speaks of remarkable things
by darcy.lindbergh
Summary: "They had been married for a month when John discovered Mary Morstan was, in fact, an infant who had been stillborn in 1972. The irony is not lost on him." John struggles to move forward against the weight of his losses. Sherlock does some gathering together of things that are left. TW: Pregnancy loss.
1. Chapter 1

_Note: This fic ignores the events of HLV but keeps Mary's history, following instead a trajectory without Magnussen, where Sherlock reveals Mary because he figures it out himself, which we all know he'd have been capable of doing if he had thought to try. The title is taken from the poetic prose novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor, for many reasons._

_TWs: minor character death, pregnancy loss, miscarriage._

* * *

They lose the baby.

John cannot breathe around the deep pain swelling under his sternum. The stillness of the ultrasound image will be burned into his retinas, will be projected onto the back of his eyelids every time he closes them. _Confirmed: no heartbeat._

He's a doctor, a _fucking doctor_, and they still lose the baby. A million useless questions scroll through his mind over and over and over: what did he do wrong? What didn't he see? How much does he have to give? He doesn't have any answers. No one does.

Mary is small, ensconced in the hospital bed, waiting for the drugs to kick in that will force her body through the motions. The baby was at twenty-five weeks gestation. She has to give birth. A counsellor and an obstetrician spoke with her in hushed tones about the procedures and the options, all the pros and cons and ramifications and consequences. John listened to all the things he already knew, the things he thought would never apply to him. He says nothing. When the baby slips free, there will be only silence.

John can't escape, can't leave the room, because walking down to the elevators to go to the canteen requires him to walk past the newborn nursery, and there are babies in there that have heartbeats. There are parents standing in front of the glass that have children. There are aunties and uncles and grandparents and friends and John hasn't called anyone to tell them there was nothing in the ultrasound, now three days ago.

They don't speak to one another; the nothingness has spread between them. Their budding marriage is already over, just as sure as the budding life in Mary's belly is over.

It isn't a question of blame. They can lay blame at each other's feet for the rest of their lives and it won't make a difference because there is no indication that this was anything under their control. Statistically, roughly half of all pregnancy loss occurs due to chromosomal abnormalities: genetics, mutations. It doesn't matter who did what or said what or whether anybody lied about anything. In the end, the odds were the baby never had a chance because it didn't have anything to do with their many terrible choices. The odds were they had never produced anything beautiful or perfect at all, only the illusion of it.

John is being smothered by the weight of all these illusions.

The hospital provides them with a memory box, a baby blanket, and a knit baby hat. The nurses clean off the face gently, gently, and John fits a body _that looks absolutely perfect _into the palms of his two hands.

A nurse presses a palm into a clay disc, with no resistance, no flail of limb, no curl of finger. The impression will dry in the open air, a memory of a palm print without life. They all speak in soft voices, an automatic shift around an infant with closed eyes: don't wake the baby. John does not speak at all. This baby cannot be woken.

* * *

Mary had had a glass of wine at the wedding, when the baby was barely any bigger than a poppy seed. Maybe that was why.

* * *

John first decided to be a doctor when he was eight and his mum got sick.

It was really sudden, the way it happened. One day she was fine, and the next she was tired, and then they spent Johnny's ninth birthday in a hospital ward and she turned into someone else. He couldn't understand, with all the doctors around, why no one was helping her get better. He didn't remember the last thing she ever said to him.

Harry had been eleven and she was _so angry, _how _dare_ their mum leave them, how _dare _she leave when they needed her. Who was going to teach her about make-up and monthlies and boys, who would take her shopping for a wedding dress, who would teach her how to make those perfect flaky biscuits?

In the end, John helped with the girls, instead of boys, to make up for not being able to help with the rest.

* * *

They go home the next morning, empty-handed. John settles Mary into bed, her body still wrecked and aching from induced labor. He sets the prescriptions next to her on the bedside table with a tall glass of water. She takes them wordlessly and slips down under the covers. Standing outside the door, John can hear her crying, but cannot bring himself to go back in. The sharp ache under his sternum throbs in unison to her breathy sobs. He hates the noise.

In the kitchen, he makes tea and sifts through the post. The normalcy of it is hateful. That the post went on being delivered is hateful. John's entire life stopped five days ago and it is hateful that the rest of the world had gone on without them, as if it didn't matter, as if everything important hadn't ended with the nothingness of an undiscoverable heartbeat. He makes beans on toast and doesn't eat any of it. He washes the dishes without thinking about anything at all.

It takes John all day, but eventually he works up the courage to enter the room they'd picked to serve as a nursery and sets the memory box on the side table. He shuts the door behind him.

* * *

Finally, finally, he has to turn his mobile back on.

First, he calls Sarah. Her voice is gentle when she answers. "John," she says, before he can begin, "you can take as much time as you need." He closes his eyes for a moment and thinks, for once, a minor government official has been sticking his nose where it doesn't belong and John is grateful for it, so grateful, because he's missed three shifts and Sarah isn't angry.

"No," he responds. "I think I have to quit. I don't think I can go back to it again, you know? A doctor. I'm a doctor, Sarah, and I didn't notice."

She is quiet on the other end of the line for a beat, then two, before she sighs, resigned. "You're a good doctor, John. A very good doctor. There wasn't anything for you to notice. I'll take you off the schedule, but if you're ever wanting back, just get in touch." She ends the call before he can protest.

One call is quite enough for today, he thinks, putting the mobile back on the table and turning away.

* * *

John's father had been the sort of man who didn't cry. He turned to drink instead, but he was a quiet drunk who could always get it together to make toast and eggs in the morning for his kids. When John turned nineteen, it was like he just sort of let go, like he'd just decided a decade was enough and he'd gone on as far as he could, and it could be over now. Truth was, it was his liver that had had enough. The last thing he'd ever said to John was, "you'll be a great doctor."

The last thing he said to Harry was, "don't be me," which is exactly what Harry was becoming—an alcoholic.

When John finally enlisted, Harry got rip-roaring drunk and called him at three in the morning, asking why he was so determined to leave her with absolutely fucking nothing in the world but her own thoughts. How _dare_ he leave, off to the ends of the earth in search of their parents? Was he expecting to find his own forgiveness for letting them go?

They didn't speak again until he was sitting in a military hospital in Birmingham recovering from a bullet wound. They each spent hours trying to apologize to each other for how right she'd been.

* * *

"Harry?"

An excited, tinny giggle sounds from the other end of the line. "John! Oh, Johnny, just the person I've been wanting," she says. Harry had taken the news that she was going to be an aunt extremely well, and had embraced the role whole-heartedly. She was even going to meetings, doing twelve-step programs: now eight weeks sober. "I need to know what you've decided to do about the nursery."

John rubs a hand over his face. "Harry, there won't be a nursery." He pauses, listening to Harry's quick intake of breath on the other end. "We've, uh. We've lost the baby."

The breath goes out of Harry in a whoosh and John wonders if she's somewhere a little private. He should've asked before he said.

"Oh, Johnny," she breathes. "John, are you all right? Do you need me to come down? Where are you?"

"Fine, no, we're fine. Everything's been sorted, we're at home now. We found out a few days ago and it's over, it's all over, we're fine." He is not fine, but he is not going to tell Harry that. He needs Harry to be fine. He needs Harry to not disappear into the bottom of a bottle. "There're pictures, if you'd like to see."

Her voice is cracked and very low and a bit dusty sounding. "Oh. Um. Maybe sometime," she answers. No, then. No one wants to see pictures of a thing like that.

"We're fine, here, Harry. Are you all right? Do you need to come down?"

"No, no." She sounds far away. "No, I'll call Clara, she might come and stay a night. I'll call Clara. John, let me know if you need anything, all right? Just let me know. I've got to go."

She rings off before she starts to cry and John is grateful.

* * *

Maybe it was because six weeks ago, John had stayed late at the clinic for the fifth shift in a row, and Mary had carried two armfuls of milk and veg and whatever else home from the Tesco seven blocks away, on her own.

* * *

Mary doesn't really get out of bed for a week. John can hardly blame her, because they've both been watching her body change and transform back into its old slim shape. Give it a few more weeks and it will be like there was never any baby at all: the fade of swollen belly, the letdown of swollen breasts. At twenty-five weeks, Mary's slender frame carried an obvious, in-the-way weight, and her body seems to flounder with the loss of it, unsure now how to occupy space.

John sleeps on the couch and doesn't go back to bed with her. There's no use pretending. He's spent too much time already with Mary, pretending. They had been married—_married_—for a month when John discovered Mary Morstan was, in fact, an infant who had been stillborn in 1972.

The irony is not lost on him.

_A.G.R.A._, the thick black marker on the memory stick read. "My initials," she had said. In a fit of trust and loyalty, he had burned it. "Everything about who I was is on there," she had said. "The stuff on there, I would go to prison for the rest of my life," she had said. Well, it was gone, good and gone, and it wouldn't have to come between them and she could go on being Mary Morstan.

Except she had built and become Mary Watson on that identity, and he already knew she couldn't keep the identity of a stillborn child she had filched from a grave marker in Chiswick Cemetery.

* * *

In Afghanistan, if you asked, John would say he felt helpful. He felt useful. He felt like he was saving people.

He would lie.

His first patient was eighteen, a kid, a child, who stepped on an IED on his first routine patrol, losing a leg and taking a gut full of shrapnel. He lived for eleven hours, and the last thing he said was, "we tried so hard," and John didn't know what that meant. After that, the faces started to blur together. No one wrote it down, but everyone kept track of their save-loss records, and John's was on the wrong side of the scale when he got shot.

He doesn't remember where he was or what he was doing. What he does remember is _being_ shot, the feel of heat ripping through muscle, the sudden surge of blood outside his body, pain like when the sun shines too bright, and Murray's face in his. Murray, who said, "don't even think about it, Johnny," like he was telling him not to take the last pudding at the canteen, and pressed too hard on the wound. And John thought, _please, god, let me live. _

So he lived.

For a short time afterward, in hospital, in physical therapy, in his bare military bedsit, he regretted it.

* * *

Maybe it was because of the nightmares they each suffered, the restless nights that woke each other up several times a week. Maybe it was the stress of never really getting over it: what they'd seen.

* * *

The first time he goes out, he buys bread and potatoes. He forgets milk.

The first time he makes dinner, he loses track of time staring into space and leaves the pasta on to boil for too long. It goes soggy, inedible.

The first time he does laundry, he finds a burping cloth Mary must've tossed in with the last load of things she washed. He sits on the floor for an hour, holding it, wondering what they were going to do with all these things.

Grief makes a person fumble, wrong-footed. John is not a stranger to the struggle to keep his balance, but that doesn't make it easier. Instead, he feels pushed and pulled by each old wound re-opening. He thinks about his first Christmas after his mum died, the first class he had to go to after his dad went. He thinks about the routine of paperwork after losing a patient.

Confronted by reality, grief colours everything with the questions of how to deal with it all. Will he or won't he react to the unexpected movement of a bird taking flight from the roof of a building across the street? How will he (should he?) react to the sight of a pram, to the ring of a toy being shook? Does he dare to order takeaway? To answer his mobile when Harry calls?

He thinks about every old hurt again, trying to decide if he will ever forgive himself for all the things he let happen.

He thinks: _not yet._

* * *

John comes home from Tesco three weeks after the ultrasound to find the flat immaculate and a yellow paper on the kitchen worktop. He puts the milk and yoghurt in the fridge and turns to look at it, and is surprisingly unsurprised to realize it is a note from Mary.

_AGRA called and I've had to go._

It's a convenient excuse, likely no more than a half-truth. He wouldn't have bought the yoghurt, had he known.

He calls her mobile, which is of course disconnected, and wanders through the flat. In the bathroom, her shampoo and hairspray are still there, half-full. In the bedroom, he slides her wedding rings gently into the top drawer. Mary Watson no longer existed—never really had.

He gets one text two days later: _Trail cold at the Czech border. No signs of surveillance or danger. –SH._

It is the most reassuring thing that has happened so far, to know that even though John never called or texted or made an effort at all, someone is still there, watching at the fringe of John's life, waiting. John makes a cup of tea and stares at the wall in the living room for three hours thinking about everything.

The dull ache underneath his sternum lessens, just the tiniest bit, as though there had been some kind of resolution.

* * *

John met Sherlock at the end of January: a swath of colour in the grey of winter. It doesn't really surprise him to find himself thinking about Sherlock now with the same sort of melancholic nostalgia he feels when he thinks about Mary and the ultrasound. John feels like he is remembering Sherlock again the way he did when Sherlock was away, even though now Sherlock is here and Mary is gone, instead of the other way round.

At a time when the lure of an illegal handgun was very nearly overpowering, Sherlock swept John up and reignited that peculiar sensation of having another person in the atmosphere. Sherlock was loud, he was energy, he was fire. Sometimes he was sour and dark and despondent, an oil lamp on the cusp of burning out, and other times he was a bonfire, an explosion of words and fury and intensity, and other times still he was a hearth at home, crackling with familiarity.

You couldn't merely exist around Sherlock—you had to be purposeful. You had to decide to live. You had to put _effort_ into it.

They went to crime scenes and chased cabs and dodged blow-darts and bullets. They existed in the tenuous domesticity that is built on cups of tea and violin compositions and late-night takeaway. It was dangerous and absolutely mad. For eighteen months, it was brilliant.

Then Sherlock stepped off a roof like he was expecting to fly.

The world went sort of foggy.

John spent a lot of time not thinking about it. He spent a lot of time not thinking about Sherlock's outstretched arms, or the flail of his legs against the stark grey backdrop of Bart's, or the blood weighing down curls on the pavement. He spent a lot of time not thinking about why Sherlock had done it and he never, ever, ever thought about what he could have done to pull him back from the precipice.

Then he'd found Mary, or maybe she'd found him, bright, beautiful Mary, who was the opposite of Sherlock's dark, dangerous life. She was stable, she was steady, she was natural—a new nurse at the clinic. The sheer bold normality of a workplace romance after months of floundering in the wake mad-insane-spectacular.

After eighteen months with Sherlock and eighteen months without, Mary felt like a saving grace. Like balance. He didn't have to chase criminals and carry a gun; he could lean around a soft shoulder to help make risotto in the kitchen and watch telly. John sometimes felt like he was eight again, when things had been sunny and his mum had made scones and served tea in the garden.

John moved in with Mary after a month, too much too soon, but he needed the feeling of another person in the fringes of his life. Without Sherlock, he felt like he was accommodating emptiness; with Mary, he accommodated the vivid promise of the future.

It wasn't adrenaline-fueled cases and clients, it wasn't Chinese take-away at one in the morning, but it was reliable and after decades of uncertainty, it didn't always feel right, per se, but it did feel good. He bought a ring on their eight-month anniversary and tried his damnedest to orchestrate the perfect moment.

* * *

Sherlock was dead for exactly two years, four months, twenty-two days, and twelve hours. Exactly, because when you're Sherlock Holmes, you apparently get to schedule your resurrection down to the second.

John had visited Sherlock's grave exactly one-hundred and twenty-four times.

* * *

221B Baker Street looks exactly the same as it did the last time John was here, which is nice, because it seems like time also stopped here when it stopped for John in the ultrasound room five weeks ago. The microscope is still on the table, the papers and files are still strewn about the sitting room haphazardly, and the skull on the mantelpiece is still overlooking it all with disdain. Sherlock is out, which is also nice, because John gets to take a moment to get a feel for what he's been doing since they last saw each other, nearly a month and a half ago now.

Mrs Hudson busies herself making John a cuppa and pointedly not mentioning either Mary or the baby, confirming John's suspicions that Sherlock had told at least some people what had happened, and he is grateful, grateful for the intrusion. Mrs Hudson had been so happy to hear that there might be a baby at 221B and therefore someone to fawn over who was somewhat more responsive than her current tenant.

In any other circumstance, John would have asked if she were all right and comforted her a bit, but in the current circumstance, John isn't even sure if _he_ is all right, and he is in no position to comfort anybody, so instead they talk about the weather.

The milk in the fridge is current and the only body parts he sees are properly stored in the freezer. There is a loaf of bread that looks a bit stale but not mouldy, and the beakers and test tubes are clean, waiting for the next experiment. The violin case is open but there are no papers on the music stand, so probably Sherlock has been playing but absent-mindedly, which means there is a case on.

Good. That's good.

John takes the cup Mrs Hudson brings and says meaningfully, "It's all right, I'm fine," before she bustles back downstairs. He picks up the old book next to his chair and tries to pick up on the plot again so he can continue. So he can think about something other than Mrs Hudson carefully wiping tears away in her kitchen.

Sherlock swirls in several hours later—two or three, it's hard to remember—flush with post-case adrenaline. John finds himself sitting Sherlock down on a chair in the kitchen and pulling out his old first-aid kit to clean a few scrapes and decide if the cut through his left eyebrow needs stitches.

"So he pulls a knife, a _knife_, honestly, and starts shouting about how she deserved it, all very useful when half the Yard is sitting just on the other side of the window. The attack was predictable, could tell by the angle he was holding his knife and the wear on his shoes, but I was unarmed and none of this—" he gestured at his face—"would have happened if Lestrade hadn't waited so long to interrupt."

It is reassuring to hear Sherlock go on about the case because they aren't dancing around the issue of what John's life had been like in the past five weeks. Sherlock explaining a case is so much easier to handle than Sherlock explaining how he has been keeping the surge of sympathetic faces at bay.

John sits back in the kitchen chair. "No other injuries, then? He just bashed up your face a bit?"

There are a few scrapes across Sherlock's knuckles and he is settling his weight on his left hip as though he might have been struck across the right side of his ribcage, but Sherlock nods anyway. He jumps up and strides back to look over some papers in the sitting room. "Still a few cases on, though," he says. "Private clients, nothing terribly difficult but things I can't do simply from the flat. Could use an assist, if you're available."

His voice is perhaps a bit _too_ nonchalant, and Sherlock very rarely takes more than one client at a time so it feels like a set-up, but John allows it. "Yeah, I've got a bit of time. I'm just preparing, you know, to pack up." He doesn't feel the need to explain this, and Sherlock doesn't ask him to. Sherlock already knows about how John didn't go back to work, about how he is living alone now, about how the army pension isn't enough to sustain the empty flat.

"You could move back here," Sherlock offers casually, shuffling through the pile of papers on the desk, looking for something. He appears to be only offering John responses distractedly. John is grateful—_again_—for the show. "Bedroom upstairs is still free."

John can't stop the grin before it tugs the corners of his mouth, even though it makes the ache in his chest swell just a little, like it irritates the edges. "Yeah," he says. "That'll do nicely."

* * *

Sherlock's last words to anyone were to John: "Goodbye, John." John had carried those words with him like a personal religion. Goodbye. _Please, will you do this for me? It's my note._

Except that wasn't ever intended to be the last. Seeing his face again, peering down at John's with that sly grin, made John so angry, because he had wanted so many people to not be dead, and he was only getting this one man back.

And John knew that he wouldn't trade this one for any of the others. He would continue to choose this particular one, this one who had apparently left and lied and forced him to watch and made him promise—_please, will you do this for me?_—and let him drown in mourning and melancholy. John knew he would always choose this one. He hated himself for it.

* * *

Maybe that was why: you only get the one miracle.

* * *

The first morning of John's married life, he'd gone out and picked up an at-home test kit, and when it came back with two pink lines Mary cried for two straight hours. He didn't know whether it was out of joy or fear or anger or fulfillment or loss. When she was finished, she kissed his cheek and said, "it's going to be a girl."

They did everything right. They waited eleven long, difficult weeks to tell anybody, because they were both medical professionals and they knew the statistics. Mary had regular ultrasounds and took pre-natal vitamins and read _What to Expect When You're Expecting_ and _The Day-by-Day Pregnancy Book_.

She was a nurse. John was a doctor.

They thought they had this under control.

* * *

The last room of the flat he needs to pack up is the second bedroom: the nursery.

It took John two weeks to go through the entire flat to reach this point. Sherlock had been startlingly present, although perhaps not helpful, sitting in whatever room John was sorting through and occasionally criticizing John's taste in household accoutrements. It was odd, having Sherlock around. Having another body in the flat felt strange, having been alone in it for several weeks now.

Even though every last thing about that other body was the antithesis of Mary, it still reminded him of what it was like to have her there. It left everything feeling tender, bruised.

The project of packing and moving is a welcome distraction from those sorts of thoughts.

John gets rid of everything he doesn't immediately need, which essentially boils down to everything that was even a little bit Mary's. Even the wedding rings go, now tucked back inside their original ring box, thrown into the pile of the detritus of a life together. If he occasionally sees Sherlock scavenging an unidentifiable item or two out of the piles, he pretends not to.

But he had asked Sherlock not to come, not today. The nursery is a private thing.

Since they hadn't yet chosen a colour to paint, everything they'd collected is still in boxes. They had been planning to move it all out to paint the weekend after the ultrasound. John had wanted it yellow; he detested pink. There's a cot, toys, onesies, blankets, all the things they were going to need, brought in to build the nest.

John isn't interested in any of these things, the things brought in for a new life that never came. He is only interested to know whether the memory box is still sitting on the side table. He has studiously avoided the nursery since Mary had gone, because he isn't sure whether he wants it to be there or not.

It isn't.

The ache behind his sternum roars to life, causing his stomach to roil and his eyes to sting. His knees give out; his back hits the wall hard. The evidence of the consequences of an ultrasound, seven weeks ago, disappeared out of his life along with so many other things. The empty space taunts him, as though he could go back to the kitchen and find Mary, still there, still pregnant, smiling at him. He thinks about a palm print pressed into clay and wishes he had taken the time to memorize every little crook and line and detail.

Had he cried, at the ultrasound? At the hospital? He can't remember. He slides down to the floor, pushing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, painfully hard. He sits for a long time. When he takes his hands away, they are wet and his eyes feel heavy.

He's a doctor, a _fucking doctor_, sitting on the floor in the nursery of a baby he lost—a baby he didn't save.

* * *

There isn't a grave to visit this time. Seven weeks after, John visits a familiar black headstone for the one-hundredth and twenty-fifth time and imagines something little there.

It suits: an empty grave for an empty ultrasound.

* * *

_A/N: You can find me on Tumblr under username watsonshoneybee, for story updates and so on. I post alarmingly beautiful pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch, wax poetic about Martin Freeman and John Watson, and generally just try to handle BBC Sherlock.  
_


	2. Chapter 2

John opens his eyes.

The ceiling of his bedroom at 221B yawns back at him; he takes a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Just a dream, then. The space on the right side of the bed is bigger than he remembered it ever being before.

It isn't fair that after all those weeks living alone, surrounded by her things, he didn't really begin to miss her until he'd come back to Baker Street.

It isn't fair because he can't tell if he misses her because he wasn't done loving her, or if he misses her because he wishes this weren't happening. He cannot remember if he had loved her that morning, on the way to their appointment. It feels important, although he can't say why.

Did he still he love her before the ultrasound came up quiet?

Lost, John thinks, is not really the right word for it. It's not as if they've been misplaced.

_Lost_ implies something can be gotten back, if only John could find it. The things he's getting back now are the things he didn't lose. The things he's getting back now are the things he walked away from.

Like the key to 221B Baker Street, with all the memories tied into its weight, back in his pocket again. The key he'd handed to Mrs Hudson three years ago with only an "I'm sorry," to soften the blow.

There is some tension in the flat, a strained feeling of how-to-question-mark when it comes to living with Sherlock again. It feels like it did in the beginning, when Sherlock held himself back a little, like he wanted to make a good impression. But then, things are bound to be awkward when you're living together again with the man who pretended to off himself in front of you. _Please, will you do this for me? It's my note._

Maybe he should've just gone for a bedsit, after all.

It's the quiet, really, that bothers John the most. Sherlock had always operated with at least a low-level of volume; John is more used to the varying tones of the violin, the rings and clinks of glass beakers and slides, even conversations where he is not sure if Sherlock is talking to John or to himself.

But John has never lived with this Sherlock and this Sherlock is quiet.

This Sherlock spent two and a half years underground, doing who-knows-what, going who-knows-where, and came home to John's fist and a dusty flat. This Sherlock has closed the door behind John at the end of the night for the last year, closing himself in with only refrigerated body parts and the skull for company.

Sherlock had seemed, for the past year, so much the man he remembered, and when it occurs to John now that he couldn't possibly be, it feels like a punch to the solar plexus. _What have you been doing this past year_, John wonders, _when I wasn't here?_

Now that John has noticed it, he can't tell whether the quiet is the result of restraint or atrophy.

John knows he hasn't lost a thing, because lost is not the same as gone.

Time at Baker Street passes differently, measured by case-case-client-corpse-_case_, rather than day-by-day. John does the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning and the washing, badgers Sherlock into tea and bandages him up after a few mishaps. The domesticity of it all gives him something to do with his hands.

He posts a blog entry to inform friends he is back at Baker Street, studiously avoiding the _why_, but the comments are a sort of cautious prodding—_all right?_—so he doesn't post another.

It almost could be all right, if John could forget why he was here in the first place.

A week after John comes back to Baker Street, Sherlock experiments quietly on a pair of tongues while John watches game show re-runs. Sherlock neither complains nor supplies the correct answers when the participants are prompted, so instead John is caught up thinking about the first time he saw this episode: Mary, laughing, buried under two blankets on the sofa, wearing red. John had always liked her in red.

Three years ago, this night would have felt normal.

Ten weeks ago, normal was Mary, wearing red, hands clasped protectively over the bump in her middle.

He wonders if anything will ever be normal again.

The ache in his chest burns and, as if on cue, Sherlock startles away from the tongues on the table with a gasped "_Yes!_"

"Sherlock? All right?" John asks. Normal. This is the new normal.

"Yes, all right. These tongues show it—the Bradshaw case—the victim was murdered," Sherlock rattles off, sliding the tongues into a container with a squelch. "It wasn't an accidental overdose, her brother had access to her nicotinamide; he's been poisoning her for months!"

There is a flurry of coat and scarf, and Sherlock wrenches the door open with the tongue container in hand before pausing to look back at John. "Are you coming?"

John hasn't been on a case in ten weeks. He looks down at his hands, picks at his cuticles. "No," he answers, and then he tries to smile as he meets Sherlock's gaze. He can tell by the twitch in Sherlock's eyebrow that he fails. "Not this time. Still, you know. Trying to adjust."

Sherlock looks at him for a long moment, as if trying to decide if he could change John's mind. The door clicks closed as the next episode comes on.

One hundred and twenty-six.

The first holiday season after someone goes is always a bit like living in hell.

No different this time, then.

They had decided not to get anything for each other this Christmas, months ago. It seemed to be Mary's idea of a trial-run holiday: could they still be together, did they still love each other? They were going to do gifts for the baby instead. Nothing big—by Christmas, the big things would be taken care of—but a few of the smaller details that would make things comfortable.

John had planned on putting together infant first-aid kits: one for the flat, one for Baker Street. Just in case. He had been planning to teach Sherlock how to use it, how to take care of a baby if something were to happen.

Sherlock probably would have deleted it anyway.

He ignores the holidays as best he can, but the reminders are constant. Smiling Santas plastered to the fronts of shops and seasonal carols piped into the aisles. The telly is running round after round of Christmas specials.

Harry keeps calling. He keeps not answering.

"Is today the twentieth?" Sherlock asks over tea and toast.

John looks over the top of the paper at him, but Sherlock is still standing at the worktop, intently swirling his tea bag into his cup. "It is," John answers.

Sherlock frowns: the tea, or John's response?

He appears to be working himself up to saying something, though, so John sets down the paper and folds his hands over it. Sherlock shakes his head as though to clear it, then, "My parents have invited us out for the holidays. You and I, I mean. Well, probably Mycroft as well, but he's much less irritating around Mummy."

Sherlock has, to John's knowledge, _never_ gone to his parents for the holidays. John hadn't even known he _had_ parents until after his return. John couldn't imagine that the perfectly ordinary couple he'd met (on a single occasion) had somehow produced something as maddeningly infuriating and indescribably genius as Sherlock.

Yet here he is, standing in the kitchen staring down at his tea, trying not to look like he is waiting for John's answer.

This, however, has crossed the line from feeling like a set-up to definitely, absolutely being a set-up. For his benefit, but a set-up nonetheless: an excuse to leave London, to leave behind all the familiar faces and places and forget for a few days.

John is sure there will be a lot of food and forced laughter and no one will ask about the ultrasound at all.

"Er, as…appealing as that sounds," John says, trying to be polite, "I think I'd rather stay here. Don't want to make a fuss. Treat it like any other day, you know? But you, you should go. When's the last time you saw them?"

Sherlock sets the tea down on the table with unexpected force. "I don't actually enjoy leaving London," he says decisively. "I think you're right—stay in, just any other day, this year. Mycroft can keep them occupied, I'm sure."

John sighs. He doesn't want Sherlock blowing off his parents just to watch him mope. But then, he doesn't actually know what he does want, so maybe that's a moot point.

Sherlock stalks off and John goes back to the newspaper. The world is doing that holiday-breath-holding where nothing interesting happens for several weeks. The weather forecast is predicting rain.

For the first year or so, Mrs Hudson took yellow flowers, stark against black granite. Yellow roses, mostly, but sometimes lilies. Daisies, once, which seemed too childish for the imposing headstone, but once tulips, which John had rather liked.

He never actually saw her there, but when there were flowers, it felt a little less lonely.

John knew it was Mrs Hudson because she occasionally kept yellow flowers in her flat and had once told him they reminded her of Florida. He couldn't understand why she'd want anything to remind her of Florida.

He thinks he understands now.

He pays extra for out-of-season ranunculuses two days before Christmas. He thinks about Florida. He thinks about the Czech border.

One hundred and twenty-seven.

It is just like any other day until John puts down his book to go upstairs to bed.

"John."

Sherlock sits back in his chair at the desk, closing the laptop lid partway and leaving his face in half-shadows. His eyes are the only things to catch the light. John's ribs suddenly feel too small for his lungs; he does not want to know what Sherlock might have to say, not on Christmas Day, not when Sherlock has clearly waited until the last possible moment to say it.

"It's getting late." He fakes a yawn, droops his eyelids purposefully to look tired. Hopes Sherlock will let it go. It can wait.

The chair scrapes along the floor as Sherlock stands. "I wanted to say," he begins, and steps slowly toward John. "I just wanted to say, I'm sorry."

He is not apologizing for anything he has done.

John cannot bother to pretend he doesn't know what Sherlock means. It is the first time either of them has spoken about it. He can feel his fingers starting to shake. Let it go. It can wait. "It's all right."

"It really isn't." Sherlock is looking at him with an unfamiliar expression and he wonders what Sherlock can see in his t-shirt, in his fingernails, in the edge of hair growing too long over the tops of his ears.

It really isn't. Of course it isn't.

John bows his head and closes his fingers into a fist. "It will be. Maybe. Give it time."

Sherlock is standing right in front of him now, standing maybe too close. He is close enough that John could reach out and he fights the sudden urge to wrap his fingers around Sherlock's wrist and take his pulse, to remind himself that someone is here and is real and has a heartbeat.

"I am sorry. Truly." Sherlock's voice is steady, but when his gaze flicks up from the floor to meet John's, it is a raw physical impact that betrays some deeper, unknown emotion. "I would be remiss, though, if I couldn't say I'm glad that you are here."

John thinks the ache under his sternum is trying to shake out through his hands. He swallows, swallows twice. "Thank you," he manages. He can't read the look in Sherlock's face, can't identify the unconcealed emotion in his eyes, can't see what answer Sherlock might be looking for.

John settles for the only thing that comes to mind. "Er—merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas, John," Sherlock answers, and steps away.

When Sherlock first came back to London, he dropped apologies by the dozens, by the hundreds, like if he said it enough times, it would make a difference.

"You're not sorry," John had said, caught between too angry to even shout and too resigned to even be bothered. "You left and made me watch and you're not sorry at all."

"John," Sherlock had tried, and his voice had caught on the vowel and for one horrifying moment John had thought Sherlock was going to cry. "I had to. I'm _sorry._"

He promised himself that he would never believe Sherlock's apologies; he would never let himself become a pawn in whatever game Sherlock was playing.

But this is not a game and Sherlock is not calling the moves.

John shudders into the wind, hitches his collar up against the cold. He's going to be late: traffic is insane this time of year and Harry chose a café clear on the other side of town. God, why did he agree to this?

When he arrives, Harry is already seated. She is clutching a glass of water as though it pains her, but she smiles.

"Harry, hello." He shucks his jacket and sits. "You look well."

She really does. Her hair is a bit darker and longer than he remembers and she looks less gray and washed out. "Thanks," her smile grows, "I'm eight months sober now. Never thought I'd manage it."

John's answering grin suddenly feels plastered to his face, a cut-out of someone else's mouth. Eight months. Harry entered her program when they found out Mary was pregnant, and now here she is: eight months sober.

He's happy for her. He's happy something good came out of the pregnancy. He's happy that he's sitting in some fucking café with his sister celebrating her fucking sobriety with water.

They order sandwiches and coffees while Harry pries for details about what John is occupying himself with, both of them steadfastly ignoring the increasingly clipped tone he is unable to control. He picks apart his lunch, leaving layers of ham and cheese and tomato lying separated on the plate.

He can read the judgment of his answers in the downturn of Harry's mouth as she says, "It's been three months, John."

As if he's _behind schedule_ in getting over it.

"You need to do something to get out of that flat every so often," she berates as they're putting their jackets back on after a painful forty-five minutes. "It's not healthy, what you're doing."

"I suppose you'd know all about what's healthy," he snaps.

Her face is hard. "I could've gone back to it, you know. I could've done. It was hard and I have hated every minute. I could've been just like Dad, after Clara left, and again after—well, after everything. But I didn't. I didn't."

One hundred and twenty-eight.

Last year, on New Years' Eve, John and Mary had swung by Baker Street late and counted down the final seconds with cheap champagne. He had kissed her, hard, right as the clock struck twelve.

Sherlock sat plucking the strings on his violin, and at midnight he had turned his face away. He had only been home two and a half months. John had felt guilty when Mary took him by the hand to tug him down the stairs, to hail a cab, to take him home, with Sherlock sitting alone, half-drunk on champagne, looking like he didn't really want to celebrate another year.

It was the only time John ever wondered if Sherlock regretted coming back.

"Okay," John agrees. "I'll come."

Sherlock blinks, surprised, but does not ask about the change of mind. John is grateful, because he does not know what prompted it himself. New year, he supposes. New beginnings.

The case is some murder out in a nondescript block of flats in Highgate. Sally Donovan is standing in the stairwell, talking into a mobile, when she sees them. She does not comment as they pass. Something in the set of her mouth and her eyes makes John's stomach turn.

"Sherlock, through here," Lestrade calls. He looks up and smiles when he sees John. "John, hello—"

He is cut off as Sherlock very carefully and very immediately inserts himself between them. He leans low, whispers something fast and sharp into Lestrade's ear.

When he pulls away, Lestrade looks vaguely offended. "Yeah, of course," he assures. "Of course, I took care of it. Won't be a problem."

No one at the scene asks John where he's been or what he's been up to. No one even meets his gaze. Sherlock seems to have spent quite a lot of time over the past three months speaking low and fast into people's ears, protecting John from prying questions.

Maybe John wants the prying questions, he thinks suddenly, the idea flaring hotly in his chest. Maybe he wants someone to say something. Maybe he wants someone to take him aside and ask if he's all right.

Maybe he wants something to acknowledge that this happened, someone besides Sherlock, someone outside the twisted world, the questionable reality, that 221B can sometimes be.

Sherlock looks at the victim's wrists and the hem on his trousers and makes some conclusion John doesn't really hear. Sally Donovan has come into the room. John stares at her as she tries to decide whether to harden her expression into something more familiar or soften it into something more sympathetic. It's making her look as though her lunch disagreed with her.

Sherlock takes off deeper into the flat to rummage for something in the bathroom. John steps in next to Donovan and waits.

"Doctor Watson," she nods.

"Sergeant Donovan."

They stand silently next to one another for a moment longer before Donovan huffs out, "Our condolences," voice oddly gruff and low, and she escapes back out into the stairwell. The affirmation he'd wanted, but it's not really so simple after all. What was she recognizing? What condolences is she offering?

What has Sherlock told all these people over the past thirteen weeks?

What are considered the facts of John Watson's life?

He doesn't write up the case.

John sits in a coffee shop for two hours, suspecting Sherlock has followed him. The persistent quiet in the flat is almost overwhelming. John suspects that quiet follows him, clings to him, even when Sherlock doesn't.

He sits and thinks about Harry, who got sober for a baby and stayed sober after it was gone. He thinks about Sally Donovan, who never apologized for accusing Sherlock of unspeakable crimes, whose voice went rough to apologize for this, now.

John thinks about Christmas, Sherlock's single direct acknowledgement that the ultrasound happened, that this was real. He tries to speculate about whether Sherlock will ever stop trying to make it disappear.

He draws no conclusions.

These are the facts of his life: it has been thirteen weeks and he is just as uncertain about it all now as he was in that darkened ultrasound room.

The dregs of his coffee are bitter and gritty, but he forces it down.

In the beginning, before the very first appointment, Mary had laughed and said she hoped the baby would be born on the sixth of January. When they were given a due date for later in the month, Mary had smiled and laughed conspiratorially. "Well, you never know. They could be wrong. It could always be the sixth anyway."

Sherlock turns thirty-eight. John pretends to have forgotten.

One hundred and twenty-nine.

"What do you tell them?" John asks one night, Indian take-away spread over the coffee table.

Sherlock, sitting at the desk and ignoring the food, doesn't look over. "What do I tell who?"

"About Mary. Lestrade, Mrs Hudson, everyone." John fiddles with his fork, moving his food around but not picking any of it up. "What do you tell them happened?"

Sherlock's eyes slide from the laptop screen to John's face. His face is expresses genuine curiosity, but his Adam's apple bobs as he swallows hard. "Why does it matter?"

John shrugs and sits back further into the sofa. "I might need to know. Don't you think, in case someone asks?"

Sherlock studies him for a moment, then sets the laptop aside and snags a piece of naan as he moves to sit on the sofa as well. "I tell them the truth. That the baby was stillborn, and Mary decided it was best to cut ties. She is now, as far as anyone knows, living with an aunt in America."

"Oh." John wasn't sure he what he was expecting. Some spectacularly complex lie, most likely. Another mad plot to make things seem different than what they were. Instead, there are just the cold, hard facts. The baby died and Mary left. Their baby died, so she left.

His daughter died.

John's sternum caves in on itself a little and his eyes prickle with sudden pressure and he pushes the carton of food away.

Sherlock settles close and sets about shredding the naan in his fingers. The sofa sags a little under his weight and John's cushion dips. They tilt toward each other, not quite touching, the heat of Sherlock's body only a hands-breadth away.

A few weeks after the holidays, John is dragged out of sleep unceremoniously by an enormous crash from downstairs at half-six. He lays in bed for a long minute, wondering if he should go down or leave it alone, before he hears Sherlock call up, tentatively, "John? I need you." Followed, a moment later, by, "Wear shoes!"

John gets up, grumbling, and throws on a dressing gown and the only shoes he currently has upstairs—a pair of black dress shoes—and goes down. Sherlock is standing in the kitchen, surrounded by broken glass, looking rather shell-shocked.

The first thing John notices is that Sherlock himself is barefoot.

The second thing he notices is that Sherlock is bleeding _from everywhere._

"Jesus Christ," John says, his breath catching in his throat. The only protective gear Sherlock has got on is a pair of goggles, and thank God for that, because everything else that was exposed—his hands and forearms, his neck, the uncovered portions of his face—is dotted with fresh wounds and wet with whatever he was working with. There are even a few spots of blood across his chest and stomach, inky blotches on his soaked t-shirt.

"That wasn't supposed to happen," Sherlock states, rather stupidly.

John feels the forced calm of _react, now,_ settle over him, switching into the role of Doctor Watson like switching on a light. It's been months since he has felt that sense of determination and confidence in his own competence.

He leaves Sherlock standing there a moment and goes to collect a pair of shoes from Sherlock's room, the first-aid kit from the bathroom, and a broom and dustpan from the cupboard.

"What exploded?" he asks as he sets the shoes down and helps Sherlock lift his feet into them. He's moving unusually slowly, John notes.

"Seven glass beakers."

There's enough blood on his arms now that there are undoubtedly a few rather deep lacerations. They might have to go to hospital. He finds himself hoping they don't scar; Sherlock's got nice skin.

"And what made them explode? Is this a hazardous substance you've got all over you?"

Sherlock looks down to where John is putting his left heel into its shoe with his bare hands and says, "Um."

"Right. Okay. Into the shower. No, hold your arms out in front of you, you're bleeding on everything."

John guides him into the bathroom and into the tub, fully clothed. After removing the shoes once more, he turns on the spray. He continues to ask questions—did it get in your mouth, is water flushing sufficient, what symbol on the periodic table represents lead. When Sherlock rolls his eyes at the last and spits out the answer, he retreats and goes to start sweeping up.

He doesn't even consider being mad about it.

Sherlock emerges some time later, shirtless and barefoot. He holds himself stiffly, unsure. The shower had washed away the blood but it is already starting to run fresh from the deeper wounds again.

John cannot help but notice, however, that beyond the new wounds, Sherlock's skin is an unfamiliar landscape. His chest-and when he turns the corner into the sitting room, especially his back-is decorated with silvery-pink scars John doesn't remember. He hasn't seen this much of Sherlock since before his time away.

Not ten minutes ago, he was hoping the gashes on Sherlock's arms wouldn't scar, and now he is confronted with evidence-evidence of what? Some horrible accident? Close encounters with criminals? He takes a breath to ask, but Sherlock's eyes flash and his shoulders pull back, as if preparing to defend himself from a physical attack, so John lets the questions die in his throat. Another day. There is a job to do here.

Aside from the new wounds and the old scarring, Sherlock's general physique still looks healthy: despite how thin he appears, he's maintaining a solid layer of muscle. Whatever he eats, it must be enough. _Focus on that,_ John thinks. _Focus on right now._

"No hospital," Sherlock says resolutely, once he realizes John is not going to comment. He sits on the coffee table so John can tend the wounds.

"Might not have a choice, some of these." John prods at a particularly nasty laceration across Sherlock's forearm. "I can make do with a butterfly bandage for now, but I'll reserve judgment on whether you need A and E."

It takes a long time to make sure he's seen to every wound. Most of them are superficial, so he settles for daubing on some antibacterial ointment and skips the plaster on them. Even so, John uses all of the butterfly bandages he's got in his kit. Sherlock's hands and arms took the brunt of the harm, though, and Sherlock will certainly be very sore and very sorry in the upcoming days.

The bandages are barely in place before Sherlock's mobile dings. "Perfect," he breathes. "Get dressed, John, there's been a murder."

The body is nestled behind a skip in an alley in Battersea. The forensic team has cleared off by the time they arrive, and the usual faces of Lestrade's unit are just filing out as they go in. Lestrade himself is strangely quiet, with none of the hurriedness he usually carries.

No one comments on Sherlock's fresh wounds. John can't decide if it bothers him.

He turns his attention instead to the body and gives it a once-over: male, late forties or early fifties, cause of death was blunt trauma to the back of the head. Nothing remarkable.

For his part, Sherlock spends nearly a half an hour pouring over details no one else would have noticed and which John is not entirely sure are in any way relevant, and then sweeps out of the scene without explaining anything at all.

It marks the beginning of John's frustration.

Of course, Sherlock has already got a plan in his head to solve the crime and doesn't seem to see the need to inform John about what the plan might be, what they might be looking for, or even where they are going.

They spend the afternoon all over London, criss-crossing neighborhoods, sliding in and out of shops, digging through bins. None of it makes any sense to John. He fights the increasing urge to shake Sherlock by the shoulders and force him to explain; it isn't usually so difficult for John to follow what Sherlock is thinking.

Between his increasing anger and the early hour he was startled out of sleep, he feels the exhaustion setting in much earlier than it normally would. He makes Sherlock stop once so he can grab a pre-packaged sandwich and a coffee, but it doesn't particularly help. The day drags; he thinks with some fondness of a shower and a nap and considers leaving Sherlock to it and going home more than once.

Lestrade texts twice asking about what they're finding, then gives up trying.

"I need you here, John," Sherlock says, but he won't stand still for two minutes to tell John anything about the suspect (who turns out to be a waitress in Soho), or the murder weapon (which turns out to be a length of lead pipe Sherlock fishes out of a bin in Camden), or how either the suspect and the murder weapon came to converge in the alley in Battersea with the victim, or how they dispersed after the job was done.

The only upside is that they do have to stop at Bart's to run a few tests in the evening, and Sherlock consents to having Molly nick some supplies so John can stitch up the deeper lacerations from the morning.

John puts in five stitches while Sherlock finds whatever speck of paint or bit of thread is going to solve the crime.

By the time they figure out who the murderer was and where she lived, however, the Met has already got her in custody: they arrive at her flat just in time to see her disappear into a police car.

"Bit late, boys," Lestrade says, unsurprised to see them as they approach. "Got it handled."

Sherlock hands over the length of lead pipe without a word. Lestrade motions for an evidence bag. It is all very quick and perfunctory.

John can't help but feel a little put out: hand-delivering a killer to police is Sherlock's favorite part. Plus, after all the time they spent figuring it out, it's not just unusual for the Met to have beat them to it. It is unheard of. It feels like something is wrong with the way it all played out, but he can't put his finger on it, and then Sherlock is turning to him anyway and asking him to hail a cab.

Lestrade catches his arm just before John slides into the taxi. "Ring me if you need anything, all right? Even if it's just a pint down at the pub, we'll go." His face is earnest; his eyes flick over Sherlock, already settled in the back seat.

"Yeah," John says, a little confused. "Yeah, I will."

When they get back to Baker Street, it's already nearing on midnight. John has a shower and a cheese sandwich and falls back into bed without a thought in his head. He sleeps better than he has in months.

He doesn't realize until the next morning that it had been Mary's due date.

It snaps into place suddenly as he's waiting for the kettle to boil: the glass explosion, the crime scene, Lestrade's demeanor, the mad chase around London for something John didn't understand and which Sherlock refused to explain.

Sherlock never makes such extreme mistakes in his experiments and he's usually fairly careful about safety around chemicals. They have a stash of elbow-length industrial gloves and a set of industrial aprons for that very reason.

The crime scene had been devoid of the usual frenzy. Lestrade had not been pushy for details. The Met had apprehended the killer before they could pinpoint her.

So, then.

Sherlock _purposefully_ exploded seven glass beakers and cut himself up to give John something to do with his morning, then _purposefully_ had Lestrade call him in on a crime they didn't need help with, then _purposefully_ dragged him around London for a million hours, racking up the taxi meters, keeping him in the dark so he would focus on trying to figure out what Sherlock was looking for, until he was tired and ragged and didn't have a moment or a thought to spare.

That lead pipe probably didn't even have anything to do with the case, he bets.

He sighs, rubs a hand over his face. The kettle clicks off.

Fifteen weeks ago, John had thought today was going to be the happiest day he'd ever known. There was going to be _life_. There was going to be a life that was partly his, a life he would be bound to forever, a life to love and care for and watch and grow and nurture and he would have done something worthwhile, with that life.

Mary and the baby would have been at home by now, if the labor and delivery had gone smoothly.

Harry had planned to come and post up on their sofa for a few days to help, even though she had never helped anyone who'd just had a baby and was terrible with children. Mary's friends would have been popping by all afternoon, probably with biscuits and tubs of soup and frozen meals for John to re-heat.

John would have been learning about the reflexive curls of fingers and toes. There would have been a name. He wonders if they should have chosen a name. The records said _Baby Watson_, wherever there were records. Were there records? He couldn't really remember.

He had wanted something that sounded warm, sunny, light.

He tries to envision Sherlock coming to visit and can't. He has an easier time imagining Mycroft, paying the courteous visit he would have thought mandatory after failing to attend the wedding. The baby would have spit up on that bespoke suit and John would have been utterly proud.

But Sherlock, Sherlock with a baby in his arms. John can't imagine those long limbs cradling a child. Sherlock doesn't have the gentle disposition to hold a soft, frail thing like a baby—he is made of angles and sarcasm and tempered steel. Maybe Mrs Hudson would have forced him to come, would have tried to force those angular arms into a holding place.

John wonders what Sherlock's face would have looked like, staring down at that tiny life that was, at least in part, a bit of John himself.

Mary had suggested Sherlock be the godfather, but John rather thought he wouldn't be up to that kind of responsibility. There was nothing about Sherlock at all that indicated he would be fond of children, even if it were John's. John thought instead they'd ask Bill Murray, who had finished his final tour a month after the wedding and settled in Manchester.

Sherlock would have thought the baby was loud, illogical, and messy: generally unnecessary and useless. John feels a surge of anger that doesn't quite dissipate for several days.

One hundred and thirty.


End file.
